I've been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I started selling cool rocks even before I sold lemonade. At age 8, I hired my two friends to deliver newspapers and gave them 75 cents a day, and I kept 25 cents. I've gone on to start much larger companies, divisions within companies, both within the US and outside, that have led to both success and failure. Venture backed, partnerships, bootstrapped, high growth, retail, commercial real estate, technology, energy, B2B, B2C, B20 - nobody is there to buy) and more. I’ve learned my greatest life and business lessons from my failures. I recently completed a book for Wiley & Sons, entitled The 7 Non Negotiables of Winning: Tying Soft Traits to Hard Results, which you can read about here: http://www.7nns.com. My current company, Fishbowl, is a culmination of everything I’ve learned over my 30-plus business years.

10 Mobile Apps To Organize Your Business

In January, we talked about apps to make you more productive this year. Now it’s time to organize your business as well. As a company focused on helping businesses monitor and inventory their “stuff,” we thought it would be worthwhile to look at a set of mobile apps to assist with organization. In no particular order, here are 10 top picks we’ve discovered that you might want to try:

This free app for iOS will keep you organized in the most basic way possible – a to-do list. The Smart Lists hide what doesn’t need to be shown and recurring tasks and sub-tasks are simple to create. Be even more organized by assigning your tasks to others and then getting a message when they are complete.

Being able to quickly share information is key to organization and the simplest way to do that is with the free Bump app for iPhone and Android. Share contacts, calendars, files and photos wirelessly from one phone to another.

If you need to share with a little more oomph, the latest free iOS app from YouSendIt provides a comprehensive and enhanced mobile service for accessing documents, presentations, video and more from anywhere. Beyond sending files, you can also store files to shared folders and sign documents. Any changes are securely synced and instantly available for other devices and people. A mobile suite of services is also available for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Android.

There is nothing like a bunch of receipts to make you feel unorganized. This free app is available for virtually every platform and makes it easy to track all kinds of expenses. Perhaps best of all, it lets you snap a photo of receipts and categorize expenses, and can sync to QuickBooks online. It’s a great panacea for the pain and mess of expense reports.

If you’re tracking more than expenses, this is a simple app for small businesses to use to organize their spending on-the-go for up to six accounts. It can be used for tracking project budgets, business/travel expenses, cash accounts, and debit or credit cards. Entering an amount with a large custom numeric keypad, selecting a description from the editable selection wheel and tapping “Add” or “Spend” is all it takes. At any interval you can email a report of all the transactions for any account and also include a CSV file to import into any spreadsheet. No web accounts or user IDs to navigate or remember, just a simple, on-the-go, exportable running total. Available on iOS for $3.99.

Texting can get you the answers you need quickly, but it’s not always the best way to talk in a group or create a paper trail. WhatsApp, free for the first year and available on multiple phone platforms, allows you to group chat with colleagues and even share photos, screenshots and notes. You can also export and save logs from a group chat, including images so no one needs to take notes.

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Thanks for this list, David – I use WhatsApp and its an efficient and user-friendly way to stay in touch with friends and family. Some of the other apps are new to me – I will try out BaseCRM and SproutSocial next.

Thank you, Suchitra, and thanks as well for being the first to comment on our apps for organization list. Let us know what you think of BaseCRM and SproutSocial as you give them a try. Thanks always for your kind notes. Regards, David